Ashlee Simpson and F. Scott Fitzgerald

There have been reports in the press lately (most notably in the New York Post) that Ashlee Simpson has turned down an offer to pose in the nude for Playboy magazine. It's been said that the magazine was offering her a great deal of money -- $4 million, according to most reports (although one report I heard claimed it was $4.5 million).

But Ms. Simpson has turned up her surgically altered nose at the offer, telling the Post, "I can make $4 million somewhere else. My body is for me and for whoever my love interest is at that moment, and that's the only person who gets to see it."

Now, far be it for me to dispute Ms. Simpson's right to turn down any offer she pleases. She can do what she wants. But I was forcibly reminded of another person who was once offered a great deal of easy money and who turned it down.

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald was about to publish his novel "The Great Gatsby," when an offer came in from a magazine called College Humor. Since Fitzgerald was at the time best known for his college novel "This Side of Paradise," the magazine wanted to serialize his latest book. And they offered him the sum of $10,000 for the serialization rights -- a tremendous amount of money in those days when inflation and income taxes were both negligible.

Fitzgerald turned the offer down. He wanted his novel to be taken seriously as literature, and he didn't think that being published piecemeal in College Humor would help him be accepted as something more than the author of "This Side of Paradise." Besides, he felt that his new novel would far outsell his previous ones, so he didn't think he needed the money. So he passed up the $10,000 from College Humor.

But "The Great Gatsby," although it got good reviews, didn't sell nearly as well as his previous books (which Fitzgerald attributed to the book's brevity -- he would ruefully warn the Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan never to publish a novel that was less than 60,000 words long), and the expected windfall of royalties never arrived.

In his later years (not that there were that many of them -- he died of a heart attack at 44), Fitzgerald, dealing with huge bills and tremendous debt and having to toil away at crappy short stories and worthless screenplays to make a living and provide for his family, would bitterly regret that he had turned down an easy $10,000 from College Humor.

So what's the "takeaway" from this, as they say in the mainstream media? Will Ashlee Simpson similarly regret turning down an easy $4 million to pose in the buff once her 15 minutes of fame are over? I'm not sure, but I'm reminded of what I was once told by a member of an old French aristocratic family (whose family was so old and so aristocratic they're the only family of its kind mentioned by name in both Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and Proust):

"Whenever anyone offers you money," he told me, "take it."

Tom Moran